Theodor Alexander Josef Wiederspahn (February 19, 1878 – November 12, 1952), also known as Theo Wiederspahn, was a German Brazilian

German Brazilian

A German Brazilian is a Brazilian person of ethnic German ancestry or origin...

 architect. He designed many buildings in Southern Brazil, specially in Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre is the tenth most populous municipality in Brazil, with 1,409,939 inhabitants, and the centre of Brazil's fourth largest metropolitan area . It is also the capital city of the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. The city is the southernmost capital city of a Brazilian...

 city. Other locations include Novo Hamburgo

Novo Hamburgo

Novo Hamburgo is a city in the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.Its population is 237,044 . The city covers an area of 217 square kilometers, and the average temperature is 19°C, a mild one for the region...

 and Cruz Alta

Cruz Alta, Rio Grande do Sul

Cruz Alta is a municipality in the state Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The town is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cruz Alta.It is the birthplace of the writer Érico Veríssimo and of Júlio Prates de Castilhos, a journalist and politician....

.

Born in Wiesbaden

Wiesbaden

Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...

, having finished his studies in 1894, Theo Wiederspahn immigrated to Brazil in 1908. He intended to work for “Viação Férrea do Rio Grande do Sul

Rio Grande do Sul

Rio Grande do Sul is the southernmost state in Brazil, and the state with the fifth highest Human Development Index in the country. In this state is located the southernmost city in the country, Chuí, on the border with Uruguay. In the region of Bento Gonçalves and Caxias do Sul, the largest wine...

”, a railroad state-owned company, but it never happened because of contract problems. Wiederspahn then started working as an architect for Rudolph Ahrons’s engineering

Engineering

Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...

 firm in Porto Alegre. Together they revolutionized the urban landscape of the city, and many of his works became part of its artistic cultural heritage

Cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations...

.

External links

• Theodor Wiederspahn - Biography (in Portuguese)